COSMOS is a city-scale advanced wireless testbed — real radios, real fibre, real rooftops in West Harlem, plus the indoor ORBIT grid and its sandboxes in New Jersey. These tutorials are the hands-on route into it: 53 guides across 13 topics, each one an experiment you can actually run rather than a description of one.
Three things apply to everything on this page, and are worth doing once:
Modern COSMOS tutorials present the same experiment in up to three modes, ordered from the most transparent to the most powerful. They are not three different experiments: every mode reads the same parameter file and produces the same measured result — and the best tutorials prove it, with a parity harness that runs all three back-to-back and checks the results agree.
| Mode | What it is | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Manual CLI | Every command typed by hand — image the nodes, configure each end, measure. Nothing is hidden. | Your first time through: this is where you learn what the experiment actually does. |
| 2 · Ansible | The same steps as a repeatable playbook: export OMF_NODES="node1,node2" then ansible-playbook <tutorial>.yml. A preflight play checks your nodes are reachable and booted a real image before anything runs. |
Repeating a run, sweeping parameters, or building on a working baseline without re-typing it. |
| 3 · Jupyter | A notebook whose kernel runs on the console — so omf and node SSH work from the cells — with the analysis and plots inline. Open it from your laptop over an SSH tunnel or VS Code Remote-SSH. |
Exploring: change a parameter, re-run a cell, see the plot move. |
Start with the manual mode to understand it, switch to Ansible when you want it repeatable, and reach for the notebook when you want to play. The reference example is WiFi Access Point + Client — three ways; the downloadable bundle it uses ships a README that gets you from reservation to result in five commands.
Some automated tutorials use cosmos-run <experiment> instead of ansible-playbook — that is the same Ansible modality with the experiment description pre-packaged on the console (it resolves nodes by capability instead of OMF_NODES). The page always shows the exact command; if you can copy-paste it, you can run it.
Every page carries a Last verified date — the date someone actually ran it end-to-end, not the date it was edited. Pages that came over from the ORBIT-era wiki and have not been re-run say "Not re-tested (migrated 2026-06-20)": the content is preserved and may well work, but treat it as a map, not a guarantee. Those pages are queued for conversion — see To be converted at the bottom of this page.
| Step | Do this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your First Experiment: Ansible on COSMOS | The full loop — reserve, image, run, results — on one node, in under an hour |
| 2 | Loading a disk image with omf load |
Nodes boot the image you give them. This is the single most-used command on the testbed (and remember: omf load leaves nodes powered off — omf tell on boots them) |
| 3 | WiFi Access Point + Client — three ways | The three modes side by side on one simple, real experiment |
| 4 | Two-node BER experiments | A first real radio measurement, end to end, with results you can plot |
The testbed's own conventions: the experiment life cycle, imaging nodes with omf load, first contact with an SDR, and how to get results back off a node. Start here even if you are experienced elsewhere — the reservation and imaging model is specific to this facility. Start with Your First Experiment (verified 2026-08); several older pages here await conversion.
The largest and most actively maintained group. Software-defined radio from a single tone between two nodes up to full bit-error-rate waterfalls measured on hardware: the BER series (PSK, QAM, and an OFDM laboratory at FR1 that compares three ways of moving an operating point and explains why they disagree), decoding live aircraft transponders, and building an FM broadcast station with stereo and RDS from first principles — all verified summer 2026. Spectrum sensing, RFNoC Fosphor visualisation and the X310 classics await conversion.
Complete cellular stacks you can stand up yourself. Three independent 5G SA implementations — Amarisoft, OCUDU (srsRAN) and Duranta (OAI) — each available over the air and in a soft-only mode that needs no radio, so you can learn the software before booking hardware (which platform when?). Recent addition: OCUDU over a commercial Foxconn O-RU (O-RAN 7.2 split, verified 2026-08). ONAP/SMO deployment and the multi-vendor Split 7.2 page await conversion.
Millimetre-wave work at 28 and 60 GHz: the IBM 28 GHz phased-array modules (PAAM) from first principles through beam steering, MIMO with real-time baseband and link-rate measurement; Sivers 60 GHz front-ends including 802.11ad preamble processing on RFNoC; Xilinx RFSoC experimentation. The testbed's most specialised hardware — the whole group awaits re-validation on the current framework.
Measuring the channel itself rather than a link through it: wideband sounding on X310s and USRP-2974s, and the RENEW sounder for 2×2 TDD MIMO and 16×1 massive MIMO. Awaiting conversion.
The 7–24 GHz "golden band", reached with Pi-Radio front-ends. Two pages are current: making a calibrated noise file and the five-modulation OFDM BER sweep (verified 2026-08); the sine-wave, analog FM and Amarisoft-over-FR3 pages await conversion.
Access point + client — three ways (the reference three-mode tutorial, verified 2026-08-28) and WiFi Cell — one AP with many clients, measuring aggregate throughput and fairness, including through the sb4 attenuator matrix.
Classroom-ready wireless labs for K-12: AM/FM modulation and signal transmission as full testbed tutorials, plus the RET lesson library — 106 NGSS-aligned lesson plans across science, math and computer science.
FPGA acceleration (Alveo), ONAP/OSM orchestration, container migration at the edge; the COSMOS optical fabric and Mininet-Optical emulation; iperf3 methodology (three-mode, verified 2026-08); Geo2SigMap RF signal mapping with Sionna RT; full-duplex radios with FlexICoN cancellers. Most of these await conversion — see below. (The former Bluetooth & Zigbee group was retired 2026-08 — its 2010-era mote hardware is no longer fielded.)
The pages below came over from the ORBIT-era wiki. They were migrated to the COSMOS format (current names, honest freshness stamps) but have not been re-run on the current framework — no recent verification, no Ansible/Jupyter modes. They are queued for conversion in the three-mode style. (Seven ORBIT-era pages whose hardware or software stack no longer exists were retired to an admin archive on 2026-08-28.) If you run one of these successfully (or know the hardware is gone), tell us — it moves the queue.
Getting started ·
Basic usage of the USRP 2974 ·
Web-based spectrum viewer ·
COSMOS SDR resources ·
omf load (content still current; needs re-verification only)
SDR & GNU Radio ·
RFNoC Fosphor ·
CFO estimation @ 28 GHz ·
GNU Radio OFDM on X310 ·
Spectrum sensing with USRP-2974 ·
X310 + GNU Radio ·
Two RFNoC streams on one X310
4G / 5G & O-RAN ·
InterDigital 5G NR system (verify hardware) ·
InterDigital EdgeLink mmWave mesh (verify hardware) ·
OAI LTE no-S1 (candidate to fold into the Duranta pages) ·
O-RAN/ONAP pre-built image ·
Building an ONAP/SMO image ·
Split 7.2 with LiteOn/Jabil/Benetel O-RUs (partially superseded by the Foxconn O-RU page) ·
Amarisoft in Weeks Hall
mmWave & PAAM ·
PAAM basics ·
PAAM + Agora baseband ·
PAAM link rate vs SNR ·
PAAM mobile beam-steering ·
Savannah real-time PHY ·
802.11ad + Sivers 60 GHz ·
60 GHz TX/RX on sb1 ·
RFSoC + Sivers ·
Mobile PAAM OFDM link
Channel Sounding & MIMO ·
Wideband sounding (X310) and its duplicate (merge — same tutorial twice) ·
Wideband sounding (2974/RFNoC) ·
RENEW 2×2 MIMO ·
RENEW 16×1 massive MIMO
FR3 ·
FR3 sine wave ·
Analog FM over FR3 ·
Amarisoft 5G over FR3
Cloud & Edge ·
Alveo FPGA acceleration ·
ONAP on Kubernetes ·
Open Spatial Computing Platform ·
OSM + OpenStack ·
Edge service migration
Optical ·
COSMOS optical network ·
Mininet-Optical emulator ·
Optical path switching (SigComm 2022)
Digital Twins ·
Geo2SigMap + Sionna RT (already notebook-centric; light conversion)
Misc ·
Full-duplex with FlexICoN ·
Outdoor spectrum usage (OEDL-era; domain since renamed) ·
Smart-city Mask R-CNN demo
This index is maintained by the COSMOS team. Statuses reflect the framework stabilization of 2026-08; "Last verified" dates on each page are authoritative.